DES TAYLOR
Man-made hybrids fight like the very devil!
“Hybrids fight like the devil!”
NOT VERY often do I get the chance to fish for something I’ve not yet caught in a UK stillwater... but this week I did.
My mate Andrew Taylor has a trout lake which he has recently stocked with Sparctic trout. These are man-made fish, a cross between an Arctic char and a brook trout and, given their parentage, you just know they’ll be good-lookers and hopefully fight well.
So, come Tuesday morning, with the fly gear in the truck, I headed out to do battle with these hybrids.
The drive to the water was horrendous, with heavy rain and spray coming off lorries down the narrow Shropshire roads. But my luck was with me. By the time I arrived the rain had stopped and it was fairly still, not at all like the weather girl’s predictions. Not that I was not complaining – the conditions looked perfect and I couldn’t wait to wet a fly.
I selected a bold orange lure, for these fish were stockies and it should have been quite easy to get a take, at least for the first part of the day. And so it proved.
First chuck I missed a take and on the second cast, just as I was about to lift the lure from the water, I had a rainbow of about 8lb turn over and hook itself up. What a fight it put up!
I always laugh when anglers tell me trout in stillwaters don’t scrap well. Here at least, in a lake where fresh spring water passes through at a rate of 20,000 gallons a day, the fish fight like hell. This rainbow was no exception, taking me down to the backing on its first run.
I had three fish like this on the bounce, all rainbows, and while Bob, Andrew’s son, only caught one fish it turned out to be a Sparctic. Naturally, he claimed that it took extra skills to hook this fish rather than the silly rainbows I’d caught… yeah, right!
But next cast – why couldn’t it have been five minutes earlier? – I hooked and landed my first Sparctic. It weighed about 3lb but fought like a rainbow twice that size. The Sparctics run to 8lb and I couldn’t wait to get stuck into one that big.
Andrew was playing host for the day, telling us what we were doing right and wrong and cooking breakfast and lunch, but he can fish the lake any time so he let Bob and me have the run of the water.
I ended up with three Sparctics compared to Bob’s one and, of course, Bob told he’d changed his fly so he’d leave them to me to catch. Yeah, yeah, yeah… but doesn’t this banter make the day even more enjoyable among friends?
Every now and then it took a change of lure colour for me to start catching again but it was strange I could not get a take on the smaller buzzers – all the trout wanted was a lure and quite a fast retrieve.
I took one rainbow home for dinner that evening for Maggie and me, and with a cider for me and a G&T for my wife the day was complete.
We didn’t turn the TV on at all that evening, for we were in our own little bubble – not a bad place to be right at this moment.